Study examines planter costs for various sizes of farms

Planter size has a significant impact on per acre costs, according to a University of Illinois Extension study examining planter costs with different farm sizes.

"Planting more hours per day could result in a smaller planter size having lower costs," added Gary Schnitkey, U of I Extension farm management specialist who conducted the study.

The studys objective was to determine the planter size that had the lowest cost for a given farm size. Farm sizes from 400 to 4,000 acres in 400-acre increments were evaluated. Planter sizes range from six rows up to 36 rows. Planters were assumed to plant all acres with all acres evenly split between corn and soybeans.

"Two categories of costs were included in the analysis," Schnitkey explained. "These were timeliness and power costs. Timeliness costs account for yield losses from not planting near optimal times. Power costs include depreciation, interest, repairs, housing, insurance, fuel and lubrication, and labor. Power costs were calculated for the planter and the tractor to pull the planter."

According to the study, on the basis of power costs alone, the eight-row planter has the lowest costs for a 400-acre farm. The 12-row planter has the lowest costs for 800 and 1,200 acres; the 16-row planter is lowest for farms of 1,600 to 2,000 acres; and a 24-row planter is most efficient for a 2,400-acre farm. For 2,800-acre farms, the 32-row planter has the lowest cost and 36-row planters are best for farm sizes from 3,200 to 4,000 acres.

"However, when timeliness is factored in, costs change," said Schnitkey. "For example, a 36-row planter has the lowest cost for the 3,200 acres and above sizes when timeliness costs are included. When only power costs are included, a 16-row planter has lower costs for 3,200 acres and above farm sizes.

"Timeliness costs are important because least-cost planters differ when timeliness costs are included."

Die letzten 5 Focus-News des innovations-reports im Überblick:

A new assessment of NASA's record of global temperatures revealed that the agency's estimate of Earth's long-term temperature rise in recent decades is accurate to within less than a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, providing confidence that past and future research is correctly capturing rising surface temperatures.

The most complete assessment ever of statistical uncertainty within the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) data product shows that the annual values...

Physicists at the University of Basel are able to show for the first time how a single electron looks in an artificial atom. A newly developed method enables them to show the probability of an electron being present in a space. This allows improved control of electron spins, which could serve as the smallest information unit in a future quantum computer. The experiments were published in Physical Review Letters and the related theory in Physical Review B.

The spin of an electron is a promising candidate for use as the smallest information unit (qubit) of a quantum computer. Controlling and switching this spin or...

With a quantum coprocessor in the cloud, physicists from Innsbruck, Austria, open the door to the simulation of previously unsolvable problems in chemistry, materials research or high-energy physics. The research groups led by Rainer Blatt and Peter Zoller report in the journal Nature how they simulated particle physics phenomena on 20 quantum bits and how the quantum simulator self-verified the result for the first time.

Many scientists are currently working on investigating how quantum advantage can be exploited on hardware already available today. Three years ago, physicists...

'Quantum technologies' utilise the unique phenomena of quantum superposition and entanglement to encode and process information, with potentially profound benefits to a wide range of information technologies from communications to sensing and computing.

However a major challenge in developing these technologies is that the quantum phenomena are very fragile, and only a handful of physical systems have been...